Abstract
It took the destruction of two great empires to make room for the formation of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1918, a new state created out of the marcher lands straddling the Ottoman and Habsburg dominions. The histories of the Slav tribes settled south of the Danube1 have diverged since earliest times, when the power of Byzantium won the Serbs for the Orthodox rite, while the Croats and Slovenes adhered to Rome. The Ottoman victory at Kosovo Field in 1389 completed the separation, dealing a mortal blow to the crumbling Serbian empire carved out by Stefan Nemanja and his successors over two centuries. Serbia and Bosnia-Hercegovina came under Ottoman sway for half a millennium, leaving the Croatian and Slovene lands under Habsburg rule.
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Notes
The term ‘South Slav’ (‘Jugo-’ = ‘south’ in Serbo-Croatian) is in its origins a philological term coined in the late nineteenth century, and included the Bulgars, in addition to the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Since then, the expression has become fixed in its modern political meaning, to include only the three founding peoples of the first Yugoslavia.
Mallat, La Serbie Contemporaine, vol. II, p. 130. See, for a modern study, R.F. Byrnes (ed.), Communal Families in the Balkans: the Zadruga (Notre Dame, IN, 1976).
The sequence of Serbia’s begins with Milos Obrenovie (1817–39), who abdicated under pressure from the unruly clans. He was succeeded by his brother Mihajlo, aged 16, deposed in 1842 by a coup which brought Aleksandar Karadjordjević (the son of Black George) to power, from 1842 to 1859. Deposed in turn by the Skupština, Aleksandar made way for the return of Miloš Obrenović, then aged 79, who died the following year. Mihajlo Obrenović now succeeded his brother for the second time, ruling from 1860–8, when he was assassinated. The Skupstina elected his cousin Milan Obrenović (aged 14) as Prince, and in 1882 he became the first King of an independent Serbia. Milan abdicated in 1889 in favour of his son Aleksandar Obrenović, who was murdered by army plotters in 1903. Petar Karadjordjević, the son of Aleksandar Karadjordjevic, was installed as King. In 1914, Petar handed over the powers of Regent to his son Aleksandar Karadjordjević, who presided over the founding of the first Yugoslavia in 1918, and succeeded to the throne in 1921.
Banac, The National Question, pp. 66–8.
Malcolm, Kosovo, chapter 8; cf. Vickers, Between Serb and Albanian, chapter 2, on the period of the ‘Great Migration’. Paja Jovanovic’s painting Migration of the Serbs (1896) is one of the two supreme icons of Serbian nationalist romanticism — the other is Kosovo Maiden, by Uros Predic (1920), which depicts a damsel cradling a fallen Serbian hero on the stricken field.
Raymond Pearson, Ethnic Minorities, p. 32, is the source of this saying. Ivo Goldstein, Croatia, chapter 6, provides a brisk introduction to the development of Croatia, 1790–1918. Elinor Murray Despalatovic, Ljudevit Gal, is a useful introduction to the man and his milieu.
P.F. Sugar, The Industrialization of Bosnia-Hercegovina, 1878–1918 (Seattle, WA, 1963), and R. Donia, Islam under the Double Eagle, 1878–1914 (New York, 1981), are two important studies in this context. For a general survey of Bosnia in the nineteenth century, see Malcolm, Bosnia, chapters 10 and 11. The name ‘Bosniak’ (Bosnjak) is a means by which the Bosnian Muslims have from time to time tried to distinguish themselves from the Serbs and Croats in Bosnia. In 1994, the Sarajevo government adopted the term officially, and it has come into common usage during recent years.
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© 2004 Leslie Benson
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Benson, L. (2004). Prologue: The Road to Kumanovo. In: Yugoslavia: A Concise History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403997203_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403997203_1
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